Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 | 1 Timothy 2:1-7
Jeremy Richards
In my first semester of seminary, I took a class called “Introduction to Christian Spirituality.” One of the assignments was to watch a documentary called Into Great Silence, about Grande Chartreuse, a Carthusian monastery located high in the Chartreuse mountains in the French Alps. For the cocktail lovers among us, this is the very monastery that makes the liqueur Chartreuse (but that’s not really relevant to the documentary or our purposes this morning).
As the name of the documentary implies, the 2 hour, 42 minute film is almost completely silent, at times almost painfully silent. The first five minutes of the film primarily consist of a monk praying silently in the early morning hours, the only noise comes from his occasional movement – the rustle of clothe here, the scraping of his foot against the floor there.
The monastery is indeed grand and beautiful – a giant complex siting high up in the mountains, secluded from the everyday hustle and bustle which constitutes our daily lives. Secluded, it seems, from the politics of worldly governments, from the everyday violence that fills our TVs and news apps, from the struggles of the poor, the dispossessed, the displaced, and the forgotten.
There’s one scene in which an old, hunchbacked monk painstakingly clears garden beds of snow. It’s preceded by shots of the rugged mountains that surround the monastery. The impression I got as I watched it was of a kind of otherworldly, ivory-tower type of place, where men pray in silence and shovel snow at a snail’s pace high up in picturesque mountains while the world below is a cacophony of laughter and sorrow, bravery and fear, anxiety punctuated by moments of peace, struggle with occasional victories, people falling in and out of love, families being made, families breaking up…all the things that make up life as we know it. In other words, these men – the place they lived, the life they kept – seemed to me to be so removed from the world in which we live, the world in which Christ became incarnate.
In class, when we discussed the film, our teacher asked if this monastic life was an escape, or if, in some way, it benefitted the world. Did these monks and their life of prayer actually make an impact on the world they seemed so far removed from? Our professor gave her answer, “I have to believe, that in some way I can’t understand, it does,” she said. She believed that these monks, while their lives seemed so cloistered, were actually performing a great service to the world by committing their lives to praying for the world.
Many in our world would not agree. Many in the church today would not agree. We’ve understandably gotten to the point that if we hear another hypocritical politician utter the phrase “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of tragedy without doing so much as lifting a finger, we’re gonna be sick. But the problem with this trite phrase is just that…it’s trite. It isn’t genuine. Prayer is not the problem. The abuse of the word “prayer” is the problem.
Prayer isn’t a substitute for action as these politicians seem to be implying. Prayer isn’t a back door through which we can escape the suffering and tragedy of the world. No, prayer plunges us headfirst into the world’s pain. Just listen again to Jeremiah’s prayer, which Shelley read for us a few minutes ago:
18 My joy is gone, grief is upon me,
my heart is sick.
19 Hark, the cry of my poor people
from far and wide in the land:
“Is the Lord not in Zion?
Is her King not in her?”…
20 “The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
and we are not saved.”
21 For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.
22 Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people
not been restored?
9 [a] O that my head were a spring of water,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people!
The pain of God’s people has become Jeremiah’s pain, and the only response to his overwhelming sorrow is to pray. He mourns and is dismayed not because of his own suffering, but because of the suffering of the poor. He weeps day and night for “the slain of [his] poor people.”
How many politicians who tweet “thoughts and prayers” pray like that? If they did, prayer wouldn’t be an out, but an entrance. Again, through prayer we enter into the pain of the world, we don’t escape from it. And once prayer leads us there, we’ll have no option but to keep praying, because we’ll immediately see our inability to change the world on our own. Like Jeremiah, we’ll become overwhelmed and we’ll cry out. We’ll see that while we certainly should act, our actions only go so far, and so we will pray to the Creator and Sustainer of life, that God will sustain us in the struggle, create a way where there is no way, melt hearts hardened by greed and the love of power, and work repentance in the hearts of all, so that all turn towards life, towards love, toward the Good. In other words, toward God.
This is how Paul urges Timothy and us to prayer in our reading from 1 Timothy: pray for everyone, especially kings and those who are in high positions (for who is more prone to love of power and money? Who needs God’s merciful guidance more than those who hold the lives of so many in their hands?) Paul tells Timothy to pray for everyone because God’s desire is that all will turn toward God and be saved.
Love of God and love of the world, prayers and actions, aren’t opposites, they aren’t even paradoxes. They aren’t mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent. If we say we love God but don’t love the world, then we have not understood God, and so do not love God. If we say we love the world but not God then we have missed the Divine life that pulses through all life, the stamp of the Creator on all of creation, we’ve misunderstood the world, seeing it only as material, and not imbued with the spiritual, the eternal.
If we pray but don’t act, our prayers are only sentimentality and not sincere. They are not real prayers. When Jeremiah prays, the hurt of his people becomes his hurt. But, at the same time, if we act without prayer, we have made ourselves into God, thinking we can save the world if we only work harder, and strive more ardently.
Prayer requires, perhaps more than anything, humility. In prayer we admit that there are things we cannot do, that we need God. But this is a great relief. None of us can bear the pain of the world on our own, none of us can carry its burdens on our shoulders. In prayer we hand all that over to God.
In 1 Timothy, Paul urges us to pray for everyone, especially political leaders. Some of us might cringe at that. Maybe you don’t want to pray for our current president, and if that’s not the case, if you’re a fan of our current president, you probably didn’t want to pray for our former president. Maybe you don’t like this president or the last one. Whatever the case, we’ve all had political leaders we don’t like. But Paul tells us to pray for them.
I have to say that it surprises me when people don’t want to pray for people they don’t like, whether it’s a political leader they’ve never met, or a former friend who’s betrayed them in some way. The worse someone is, the more we should want God to work in their life and transform them. The more we can’t comprehend what drove them to be so cruel, the more we realize that we can’t be the ones to understand them, let alone save them. Thank God we can hand them over to God. Thank God God knows the heart of all people, including us, and still wants to save them.
Even Jesus seems to experience the need to hand forgiveness over to God. As he hangs on the cross, he prays, “Father forgive them,” which is certainly a nice sentiment, more than I would do if I were in his place, but we shouldn’t miss the fact that Jesus doesn’t say, “I forgive them.” Maybe he’s still a little too raw as he hangs there on the cross. In that moment, it seems that Jesus can’t forgive his torturers and murders on his own, and so he hands forgiveness over to God.
Paul claims in these verses from 1 Timothy that God desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. That’s quite the audacious claim. It flies in the face of the teaching many of us heard about God’s wrath and vengeance. God desires all to be saved. The real question is, do we? And if we don’t really, we might reconsider who God is saving through prayer. Is it the ones we’re praying for, or is it us? Or, more likely, is it both?
Prayer doesn’t only transform the world, it also transforms us. If we’re constantly praying for the poor, the Spirit will surely lead us to notice the homeless more often, and feel compassion for them, which will probably lead to some sort of action. If we pray for an end to racism, the Spirit will draw our attention to our own subtle, racial prejudices that pop up more often than we’d like to admit, and we’ll have to address that. If we pray for patience, the Spirit will convict us when we lose our temper.
Changing the world begins with being changed ourselves. I’m not saying that’s all that matters, but it is the beginning. Transforming the world begins with letting ourselves be transformed. I’m reminded of the opening of a song by the hardcore band Worthwhile, “I wanna change the world, so scared to change myself.” It’s much easier to see the flaws in others and to want to change them than it is to see the same flaws in ourselves and want to change them.
Thank God we aren’t on this journey alone. Through prayer we don’t only hand over those people we don’t like to God, we also hand ourselves over to God. We confess that so much of the brokenness we see in the world is in us as well. It’s not that through prayer we change ourselves, it’s that through prayer we let God change us. We lay ourselves bare and ask that God transform us with God’s love.
And here’s the thing: God will. And I’m not just saying that. It can be scientifically proven. Studies in psychology and neuroscience show that prayer doesn’t just change what we think about, it changes how we think.
In his book, Learning to Speak God from Scratch, Jonathan Merritt explores this very idea. He quotes the neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg as saying, “Our studies are starting to show that we can fundamentally change the brain through religious experience.” Merritt goes on to say, “Not only does prayer change our brains and bodies in the moment, but when practiced over time, it leads to permanent physiological transformation.”[i]
We can’t all be monks living high up in the French Alps. Most of us, I’d guess, don’t want to be, but we can all live lives of prayer. We can all open ourselves to the transforming love of God. That might not save the world in and of itself, but at least it’s a start. Amen.
[i] Jonathan Merritt, Learning to Speak God from Scratch, 103.